The Red Horseman

6

Herb Tenney arrived at the breakfast table as the orange juice and coffee were served.

“Morning, Admiral. Commander.” He nodded at each of them in turn and gave his order to the waiter.

“Your first time in Moscow?” Tenney asked as Jake Grafton turned his attention back to his coffee cup.

“Uh-huh.”

Tenney launched into a discourse on the city that sounded suspiciously like the text from a guidebook. He looked rested and fresh after a good night’s sleep, which wasn’t the way Jake felt. He had gotten only one more hour of sleep after the excursion last night. This morning he felt tired, listless.

Tenney poured himself a cup of coffee without missing a beat in his monologue. He added a dollop of cream to the mixture and half a spoonful of sugar, then agitated the liquid with a spoon. He paused in his discourse and took a sip.

“Ahh, nothing like coffee in the morning. Anyway, Peter the Great built…”

Jake stared at the black liquid in the cup in front of him. He had already had a sip and the slightly acid taste lingered still in his mouth. Would there be a taste to binary poison? What had that report said?

Tenney took another sip of his coffee, then added another smidgen of sugar and languidly stirred with his spoon while he rambled on about the city of the czars.

When the waiter slid a plate of bacon and eggs in front of him, Jake Grafton could only stare at it.

“Something wrong, Admiral?”

Tenney was looking at him solicitously.

Jake Grafton gritted his teeth. Then his face relaxed into a smile. “Jet lag.”

“Takes a while to get over,” Tenney said. “The main thing is to sleep when you’re sleepy and not try to fool Mother Nature.”

Jake Grafton slid his chair back. “I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said, then glanced at Toad. “Come up to my room when you’re finished here.”

“Yes, sir.”

General Nicolai Yakolev, the Russian Army chief of staff, was a short, ugly man with bushy eyebrows, a huge veined nose, a lantern jaw, and ears that stuck out like jug handles. The wonder was that he could see anything at all with the eyebrows and clifflike nose obstructing his vision. Still, once you ignored nature’s decorations you caught a glimpse of lively blue eyes.

Yakolev squeezed Jake’s right hand with a vise grip, then shook hands with Herb Tenney as Jake flexed his right hand several times to restore the circulation and watched that impressive, ugly face.

“Bad news, she rides a fast horse,” the Russian said in easily understandable English.

“So I’ve heard,” Jake Grafton replied and looked curiously around the room, a vast cavern with ceilings at least eighteen feet high. Mirrors, chandeliers, a massive wooden desk atop a colorful Persian carpet, walls covered with books and several oil paintings — apparently Communists were as fond of perks as Democrats and Republicans. They were on the second floor of the Kremlin Arsenal, a two-story yellow building inside the walls.

“Nice room,” he commented.

The general smiled. “So, Admiral, what did the American government really send you here to do?”

“Watch you take tactical nuclear warheads apart, General.”

“Sounds very boring.”

“I’m also supposed to count them.”

“Ah, one… two… three… four…” Yakolev laughed. “And you, Mr. Tenney?”

“I’m with the State Department, sir. Here to assist the admiral.”

Yakolev nodded and shifted his eyes to Jake. “Is that true?” he asked.

Jake mulled it for about two seconds, then said, “He’s here to keep an eye on me all right, but he’s CIA.”

“Ahhh, a political officer, a commissar. I’ve known a few of them in my time. But as you gentlemen know, our zampolits are at the moment unemployed. The world changes. So, please, Mr. Tenney, since I am at the disadvantage, I ask you to let the admiral and me converse alone. Then no harm will be done if we inadvertently make any little political mistakes.”

Tenney glanced at Grafton, then rose and left the room.

Jake got a glimpse of twinkling eyes behind Yakolev’s bushy brows, then the general turned his attention to a file that lay before him. “Your dossier,” he said, indicating the file. “The GRU is very thorough, one of their few virtues.”

He flipped from page to page. “Let us see. You had combat experience in Vietnam, the usual tours aboard numerous aircraft carriers, command of two air wings… Ah, here is a summary of a regrettable incident in the Mediterranean that we thought would surely end your career — and that involved nuclear weapons, I believe.”

“I can neither confirm nor deny that.”

The general laughed, a hearty roar. “Very funny, Admiral. You make a little joke, and I like that. We Russians laugh to make the pain endurable. But I tell you frankly, if you expect to work with me, you and I must learn to tell each other the unpleasant truths.” He wagged a finger at Jake. “Regardless of what our politicians say or the lies they tell, you and I must treat each other as professionals. We must work together as colleagues. No lies. All truth. Only truth. You comprehend?”

Jake studied the Soviet general in front of him. He held out his hand. “May I see the dossier?”

“It is in Russian.”

Jake nodded.

The general closed the file and passed it across the desk. Jake opened it on his lap. It was thick, contained maybe thirty pages of material. Most of the pages were indeed in Russian, some typewritten, others in script. There was a front page of the New York Times with his photo and another photo taken on a street somewhere several years ago. He had been in civilian clothes then. Also in the files were several photocopies of newspaper and magazine articles about the A-12 Avenger stealth attack plane for which he had been the project manager, before full-scale production was canceled. One of the articles was from Aviation Week and Space Technology: a magazine commonly referred to as Aviation Leak by the American military. The file also contained a photo of Toad Tarkington. Jake closed the file and passed it back.

“I don’t read Russian.”

“I know. That fact is in the dossier.”

“You speak excellent English.”

“I spent several years in Washington and two in London. But that was years ago, when I was just a colonel.”

“This is my third trip to the Soviet Union — Russia.” This of course was a lie. It was Jake’s first trip.

The general merely nodded and lit a cigarette. The heavy smoke wafted gently across the desk and Jake got a dose. It stank.

Jake looked around the room again. Hard to believe, after all those years of reading intelligence reports about the Soviet military, all those years of planning to fight them, here he was in the inner sanctum talking to a Soviet — now Russian — four-star. And the subject was nuclear weapons. The whole thing had an air of unreality. He felt like an actor in a bad play devoid of logic. Life without reason— that’s the definition of insanity, isn’t it?

Jake Grafton scanned the room yet again, rubbed his hands over the solid arms of his chair, reached out to touch the polished wood of the desk.

But are these guys on the level? Do they really intend to destroy their tactical nukes? Or is this whole thing some kind of weird chess game with nuclear pieces, something out of one of those wretched thrillers about crazed Communists out to checkmate all their opponents and take over the planet?

“Do you play chess?” Jake Grafton asked the general behind the desk, who was watching him through the drifting smoke.

“Yes,” Yakolev said, “but not very well.” His lips twisted. This was his grin. After the lie came the grin. Very American, like a used-car salesman.

Jake Grafton grinned back. “I looked at your dossier in the Pentagon a week or so ago. It says you like to fuck little boys.”

The lips twisted again. “I like you, Grafton. Da!”

Jake cleared his throat. “We know your politicians are”—he was going to say “less than accurate” but thought better of it—“lying about the degree of control they have — the army has — over these weapons. I am here to evaluate the extent of your problems and make a report to my superiors. And to offer suggestions if you are receptive.”

Jake Grafton paused as he eyed the Russian general. “My superiors want the Yeltsin government to succeed in the revolution that Gorbachev began. They do not want the Communists to regain power, nor do they want to see the Soviet Union balkanized unless there is no other way. Baldly, they want to see a stable government in this country that has the support of the populace, a government that indeed is trying to improve the lot of its citizens.”

“They are humanitarians,” General Yakolev said lightly.

“Don’t ever think that,” Jake Grafton shot back. “They are damn worried men. Their primary concern is nuclear weapons. They do not want to see nuclear, chemical or biological weapons technology exported. They desperately want you to establish a viable democracy here, but first and foremost — the most important factor — your government must keep absolute control of all the nuclear weapons that exist on your soil.”

“Yeltsin is not in control of anything right now. He is at the center but the storm revolves around him. How I say it? — he is like one of your cowboys on a crazy bronco horse. He is still on the saddle but the horse goes his own way. Understand?”

“I will give you the frank, blunt truth, General. I will not repeat the platitudes of the politicians. The Americans will deal with whoever has these weapons, be it a Communist dictator, fascist demagogue, religious fanatic, or a criminal gang leader. Whoever. And I suspect the same is true of the British, the Germans, the French — all the Western democracies. But their liaison officers can tell you that themselves.”

Yakolev came around the desk and pulled a chair closer to Grafton. He sat. “You and I can work together. We are both military men, both patriots. I serve Mother Russia. You understand?”

Jake nodded.

“I am not blind. Russia must join the world. This planet is too small to sustain an isolated society of three hundred million people. We have tried dictatorship and it failed; now we must try democracy. But I lay out the truth for your inspection: no matter who rules the Kremlin, I serve Russia.”

Russia the grand abstraction, Jake thought ruefully. Well, every nation is an abstraction if you stop to think about it. He irritably dismissed the thought and asked, “And the army? Whom does the army serve?” When the Russian was slow to answer, Jake sharpened the question: “Will the army obey your orders?”

General Nicolai Yakolev spit out the word, “Yes.”

That, Jake Grafton suspected, was the biggest and baldest lie so far. And mouthed like a pro. And yet… “These weapons distort everything,” he said.

“I know.”

“While they exist, you serve only them,” Jake said.

“Control all the nuclear weapons that exist, you said. I noted your choice of words, Admiral.”

“They must be destroyed,” Jake Grafton said, “before they destroy you. You asked for truth. There it is.”

The Russian leaned toward Jake. “You are a soldier, not a politician. I like that. I think we can do business. Come.”

He led Jake to a table under a huge oil painting that should have been in a museum. There was a large map on the table. The Russian general pointed and explained where the weapons were and what might be done with the plutonium after the warheads were disassembled. Through the tall windows Jake could see the soft summer sun sifting down, gently bathing everything in a surreal light.

An hour later the men were back at the general’s desk drinking strong, black tea in tall glasses with metal holders. At the general’s suggestion Jake had stirred in juice from a slice of lemon and a spoonful of something that looked like blackberry jam.

“Perhaps you could tell me a little about yourself, General,” Jake Grafton said, jerking his thumb at the dossier.

The Russian laughed. “All the time, effort, and expense that goes into compiling dossiers, and you know what yours tells me? That you are a professional officer. Nothing else. And that I knew before I opened it.

“But it is me you want to know about, even after reading my dossier in the Pentagon. Dossiers are the same the world over. I am old, seventy years. I fought in the Great War. I was young enough to enjoy killing Nazis. In Berlin I saw Hitler’s bunker, helped search it. I saw the patio where they burned his body, his and Eva Braun’s. I walked through the rubble. All Europe was rubble then, my friend. I tell you that.”

So Yakolev had once been a shooter, a warrior. Maybe down deep under the wrinkles and gray hair he still was. Most of the top men in the world’s military organizations weren’t: they were bureaucrats and cocktail party politicians.

The general shook his head. “I was very young then. And that is the only fact about me that would be of interest. The rest is obvious. I survived. I survived!”

Ahh, Jake mused, at what cost? How many men have you sold out, General, how many lies have you told, how much of your honor can possibly be left after you clawed and scratched and gouged your way to the top of this squirming snake pile of criminal psychopaths? The scars must be there…unless you have become one of them, a man without conscience, a man to whom the end justifies whatever it takes to get there. If so…

The general rumbled on. “But no stories. Old men tell too many stories, stories of a dead past that are of little interest to the young, who think their own problems unique.”

“And I am too young,” Jake Grafton said.

General Yakolev’s eyes searched his face. “Perhaps. Your youth…” He shook his head. “You Americans turn out your officers to fatten in the pasture so very early, just when they grow old enough to have a bit of wisdom, just when they are old enough to understand all the things that they are not, all the things that they can never be, will never be. Just when they are old enough.”

Jake sipped his tea. It wasn’t like American tea, weak and insipid. He liked it.

“What do you know of Russia?”

Jake drank the last of the tea and set the cup in its saucer. “The usual, which is not much…the bare essentials, twenty years of reading intelligence briefs, a few books.”

“Tolstoy?”

“A little. Chekov I liked. Andreyev’s The Seven Who Were Hanged was too Russian.” Oops! He should not have said that! “Solzhenitsyn…” What could he say about Solzhenitsyn’s descriptions of hell on earth? They had horrified Jake Grafton, painted communism as one of the foulest evils ever perpetrated by man upon man. “I have read him,” he finished lamely.

“Hmmm,” said Yakolev, his face a mask. “Dinner tomorrow night, yes? The military observers from Britain, Germany, France and Italy will also be here. You know them, yes?”

“No, sir. I’ve never met them.”

“I will send my car for you at the embassy. About eight.”

“May I bring my aide, sir?”

“If you like. We will take the time to learn to know each other better. I will be interested to learn where you draw the line between Russian and too Russian.”

Jake was led back through the long cold hallways with their dim lights and dark oil paintings that could barely be seen. Herb Tenney was standing near the door, waiting. Outside the summer sun of the Kremlin grounds made Jake squint. The contrast between inside and outside hit him hard. He held his hat on his head as he climbed into the car.

Culture shock, Jack Yocke decided. He felt depressed, alone, listless. He could count on one hand the number of people he had met who spoke English. The constant fumbling with the paperback Russian-English dictionary frustrated him. The heavy, fatty mystery meat and greasy vegetables were clogging his bowels. Culture shock, he told himself, hoping that sooner or later he would adjust.

How good it would be to be back in the Post newsroom, talking on the phone to someone who spoke American, understanding the nuances of what wasn’t said as readily as he captured the intent of what was. Oh, for a bacon and egg breakfast, with eggs from a lovely American chicken and crisp fried bacon from a handsome American pig! To go across the street to the Madison coffee shop for a hot pastrami on rye! And an American beer, a tall cold American beer in a frosty glass with foam spilling over the top.

He was gloomily contemplating the difference between American beer and the Russian horse piss product when the motorcade came around the corner into view. Three vehicles. Black. Limos.

He was stuck off to one side of the platform where the speakers were going to address the rally. Perhaps a thousand people, mostly men and babushkas, milled around the square and luxuriated in the sun, rolling up sleeves to brown their white arms, drinking juice from glass bottles. The few children were messily eating ice cream bars sold by a sidewalk vendor, who was doing a land office business today. Apparently the vendors, for the city sidewalks seemed crammed with them, were something new, fledgling capitalists trying the new way right here beside a Communist rally. The irony of it made Yocke smile.

The paper’s Russian stringer translator was sucking on a foul cigarette and chatting in Russian with his counterpart from the New York Times. The Times reporter was on the other side of these two and busy scribbling notes, no doubt literate political insights that would form the heart of an incisive think piece. Damn the Times!

Jack Yocke took off his sports coat and hung it over one arm. He wiped the perspiration from his forehead. And damn these Commies! Why can’t they hire a hall like politicians in more civilized climes?

The senior Post correspondent was over at the Kremlin today buttonholing Yeltsin lieutenants, so Yocke was stuck covering this rally of nationalistic Commie retrogrades, people who thought that the Stalin era was Russia’s finest hour. Yes, there were still live human beings on this planet who believed that, and here were some of them, waving red flags and posters with slogans. Some of them even wore red armbands, but the red flags were the grabber: to Yocke’s American eye the blood red flags looked like an image straight from a museum exhibit. That there were still people who firmly believed in the gospel of Marx, Engels, and Lenin was a fact that he knew intellectually, yet seeing it in the flesh was a jolt.

These people were obviously committed. Just below the platform four older men were arranged in a circle, shouting at one another. No, it was three against one. Yocke couldn’t understand a word of it and thought about asking the stringer what it was all about, then decided against it. He thought he already knew the answer.

Yegor Kolokoltsev was their guru, a man who could rant anti-Semitic filth that would have been too raw for Joseph Goebbels and in the next breath extol the glories of Mother Russia. As Yocke understood Kolokoltsev’s message, the Communists never had a chance to purify the Soviet Union and make her great because the Jews had subverted them, stolen the fruit of the proletariat’s labor, betrayed the revolution, sucked blood from the veins of honest Communists, etc., etc.

So now he stood sweating as the motorcade drew to a halt and burly guards jumped from the cars and began opening a pathway to the platform. Idly Yocke looked around for soldiers or uniformed policemen. There were none in sight. Not a one.

The bodyguards in civilian clothes had no trouble clearing a path. The crowd parted courteously, as befitted old Communists. And these were mostly old Communists, workers and retired grandmothers. Here and there the mix was leavened by better-dressed younger men, probably bureaucrats or apparatchiks who had lost or were losing their jobs under the new order. Some of the waving signs and red flags partially obscured Yocke’s vision of the arriving dignitaries.

The lack of policemen and soldiers bothered Jack Yocke slightly, and he turned to his translator to ask a question about their absence when he heard the noise, a sharp popping audible even above the sounds of traffic from the street.

An automatic weapon!

There was no mistaking the sound.

The crowd panicked. People turned their backs on Yegor Kolokoltsev and his guards and tried to flee. The urge to leave hastily seemed to enter the head of every living soul there at precisely the same instant.

More weapons. The sharp popping was now the staccato buzzing of numerous weapons, but it was strangely muffled by screams and shouts.

Yocke grabbed a handhold on the rail of the speaker’s platform and pulled himself up a couple feet so he could see better.

Four people with automatic weapons were shooting at the guards, most of whom were now on the ground. One or two gunmen were pouring lead into the middle limousine.

With all the guards down, two of the gunmen walked toward the car. They were dressed in the usual dark gray suits and wore hats. The crowd was dispersing rapidly now, everyone fleeing for their lives. Several of the elderly were sprawled on the pavement. One or two of them were struggling to rise.

One of the gunmen opened the car door and the other emptied a magazine through the opening from a distance of three feet.

Yocke looked around wildly. The stragglers from the retreating crowd were rounding the corners, probably running down the streets that led away from the square.

The gunmen dropped their weapons and walked away without haste.

No sirens. No more screams.

Silence.

Yocke looked around for the other reporters and their Russian stringers. Gone. He was alone, still clinging to the side of the speaker’s platform.

He released his grip and dropped to the pavement. The whole thing had been like a slow-motion film — he had seen everything, felt everything, the fear, the horror, the sense of doom descending inexorably, controlled by an unseen, godlike hand. Now if he could only get it down!

How much time had elapsed? Minutes? No — no more than forty or fifty seconds. Maybe a minute.

He looked at the backs of the fleeing people. The last of the crowd was hobbling around the corners. Some people had apparently been trampled in the panic; six or eight bodies lay around the square.

Yocke stood and watched the last of the gunmen disappear around the corner where the motorcade had entered the square. A half mile or so down that street was Red Square. The entrance to the metro, the subway that would take them anywhere in Moscow, was only a hundred yards away.

He was alone with the dead and dying. He walked toward the cars. The guards — he counted the bodies…seven, eight, nine. He walked from one to the other, looking. All dead, each of them shot at least six or eight times. Blood, one’s man’s brains, intestines oozing into congealing piles on the stones of the square.

The middle limo was splattered with holes, the door still standing open. Yocke looked in.

The big man was Yegor Kolokoltsev, or had been just a few minutes ago. Now he was as dead as dead can be. Two of the bullets had struck him in the head, one just under the left eye and the other high up in the forehead. His eyes were still open, as was his mouth. Somehow his face still seemed to register surprise. A dozen or more bullets had punched through his chest and throat. There was little blood.

Facing Kolokoltsev was another corpse. The driver of the limo sat slumped over the wheel.

The other two cars were empty. Empty shell casings lay scattered on the street.

Alone in the midst of the vast silence Jack Yocke bent and picked up a shiny shell casing. 9mm.

One of the weapons lay not five feet from him. He merely looked. He couldn’t tell one automatic weapon from another.

He turned and looked again at Kolokoltsev. Then he gagged.

He staggered away.

His mouth was watering copiously and his eyes were tearing up. He paused and placed his hands on his knees and spit repeatedly. He had to write this too, capture all of it.

Now the sensation was passing.

He walked, working hard at walking without staggering, without succumbing to the urge to run, which was building.

The urge to run became dire. He began to trot. Faster, faster…

He saw a narrow street leading away from the square and ran for it. People were standing on the sidewalks looking into the square, but he ran by them without slowing down.

Telephone! He must find a telephone.

“Mike Gatler.” Mike was the foreign editor. He sounded sleepy, and no doubt he was. It was one-thirty in the afternoon here, but five-thirty in the morning in Washington.

“Mike, Jack Yocke. I just witnessed an assassination.”

“Terrific. Send me a story and I’ll read it.”

“Right in Soviet Square, Mike. Right in front of Moscow City Hall. They gunned a big Commie weenie when he arrived for a political rally. Crowd there and everything.”

“You woke me up for this?”

“Gee, Mike. It’s front page, for sure.”

Gatler sighed audibly. “What happened?”

“They killed Yegor Kolokoltsev and eleven of his guards. Five gunmen with automatic weapons mowed them down.” The words came faster now, tumbling out: “It was the goddamnest thing I ever saw, Mike, a cold-blooded execution. First the guards, then the politician. I’m sure some of the bystanders in the crowd were shot too. Just their tough fucking luck. Like something from a movie. That was my first thought, like something from a movie. Something staged, unreal. But it was real all right.”

“Are you okay?” Gatler sounded genuinely concerned. The contrast between the irritation in Mike’s voice at first being awakened and the concern he was now expressing hit Yocke hard.

“I guess so, Mike. Sorry I bothered you at home.”

“It’s okay, Jack. Write the story. Take your time and do it right. Kolokoltsev, huh? The Russian nationalist?”

“Yeah. Bigot. Anti-Semite. Holy Russia and all that shit. A Nazi with a red star on his sleeve.”

“You write it. Do it right.”

“ ’Night, Mike.”

“ ’Night, Jack.”

He hung up the phone and stood in the lofty, opulent hotel lobby at a loss for what to do next. Over in the corner a pianist was playing, and the tune sounded familiar. Yocke’s heart rate and breathing were returning to normal after the half-mile jog to the hotel, the only place he would find a telephone with a satellite link to call overseas. The Russian phone system was a relic of Stalin’s era and couldn’t even be relied upon for a call across town. But Yocke was still shook. The surprise of it as much as anything…damn!

Soviet Square…in front of that statue of Lenin as The Thinker…with a Pizza Hut restaurant just a block up the street where they serve real food to real people who have real money in their jeans. Hard currency only, thank you. No dip-shit Russians with only rubles in the pockets of their Calvin Kleins…

The clerk behind the counter was staring at him, as were several of the guests queued up at the cashier’s counter. Now the clerk said something in Russian. A question. He repeated it. He seemed to have lost his English.

Jack Yocke shrugged, then headed for the elevator with the clerk staring after him. He should have made the call from the phone in his room. If he had thought about the effect of his conversation on the clerk, he would have.

As the elevator door closed Yocke recognized the music, Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five.” He began laughing uncontrollably.

At the American embassy Jake Grafton spent a few minutes with the ambassador, then was shown to a small office that was temporarily unused. There he began his report to General Brown on the conference today. He wrote in longhand and handed the sheets to Toad to type.

“It went well?” Toad asked.

“Maybe.” Too Russian. Jake, you could screw up a wet dream.

He had about finished the report when there was a knock on the door and Lieutenant Dalworth stuck his head in.

“Admiral, I have a message for you,”

Dalworth held out the clipboard with an envelope attached. “Just fill in the number of the envelope and sign your name, sir.”

Jake did so. As Dalworth left the room Jake ripped open the envelope, which was marked with a top secret classification. It had of course been decoded in the embassy’s message center.

FYI — for your information, no action required. Without a word Jake passed the slip of paper across to Toad Tarkington.

“Just like that?” Toad asked with an air of disbelief.

“When your heart stops, you’re dead.” Jake Grafton folded the message and placed it back into its envelope. It would have to go back to the message center for logging and destruction. He tossed the envelope onto the corner of the desk. “Just…like…that.”

“For Christ’s sake, CAG, we’ve got to—”

“No!”

“We can’t just—”

“No.”

Toad turned his back for a bit. When he turned around again he said in a flat voice, “Okay, what are we going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Jake said.

What could he do? Write a letter to the president?

“What did Herb Tenney do today, anyway?”

“He went out this morning after you left,” Toad told him. “Came back about two or three.”

“He’s got an office?”

“He’s in with the other CIA types. They’ve got a suite just down the hall and their own radio equipment and crypto gear. They don’t use the embassy stuff.”

“Who are the other spies?”

“Well, there are about a dozen, near as I can tell. Head guy is a fellow named McCann who has been here a couple years. I met him at lunch. One of those guys who can talk for an hour and not say anything. A gas bag.”

It was impossible, a cesspool of the first order of magnitude. “Shit,” Jake whispered.

“Yessir. My sentiments exactly.”

“Have they got a safe in their office?”

“I suppose so. I haven’t been in there.”

“Go in tomorrow morning. Look the place over.”

“If I can get in.”

“Tell Herb you want the tour. Gush. Gee-whiz.”

“Yes, sir.”

Toad threw himself into a chair. He sighed deeply, then said, “Y’know, I really wish you and I had a nice safe job back in the real world — like bungee jumping or explosive ordnance disposal on a bomb squad. Something with a future.”

Jake Grafton didn’t reply.

Albert Sidney Brown dead. Damn, damn and doubledamn!

Well, it was time to call a spade a spade. The odds that Brown’s ticker picked this particular time to call it quits were not so good. Ten to one he was poisoned. Murdered. By the CIA, or someone in the CIA. Christians in Action.

If the CIA really did it he and Toad were living on borrowed time. Perhaps they had already been served half of the binary chemical cocktail. And any minute now Herb Tenney or one of his agents might get around to serving the chaser.

“You and I are going on short rations as of right now,” Jake told Toad. “Go down to the kitchen and get us some canned soda pop and some food that we can eat right out of the can.”

“What do I tell the cook?”

“Tell him we’re having a picnic. I don’t know. Think of something. Tell him I’m sick. Go on.”

After Jake delivered his report to the message center for transmission, he went up to his room. The door that led to Toad’s room was open and he was standing in it.

“Someone was in here today,” Toad said.

“You sure?”

“No, sir. But my stuff is a little different.”

Jake felt in his pocket for scratch paper. On it he wrote, “Look for bugs.”

It took fifteen minutes to find it. They left it where it was.

“Are you hungry, Admiral?”

“No.”

Jake took off his uniform and lay down on the bed. He turned off the light.

Two minutes later he turned it back on, got out of bed and checked the door lock, then asked Toad to come in for a moment. With Tarkington watching, Jake took the Smith & Wesson from his bag, checked the firing pin, snapped the gun through all six chambers, then loaded it.

No doubt the bug picked up the sound of the dry firing. Well, that was fair warning. If anyone came in here tonight Jake Grafton fully intended to blow his head off.

“‘Night, Toad.”

“Good night, sir.”

Sleep didn’t come. Jake tossed and turned and rearranged the pillow to no avail.

The problem was that he was totally alone, and it was a strange feeling. Always in the past he had a superior officer within easy reach to toss the hot potatoes to. Everyone in uniform has a boss — that is the way of the profession and Jake Grafton had spent his life in it. Now he had nowhere to turn.

He should have, of course. He should be able to just walk upstairs and get on the encrypted voice circuit to Washington. In just a few minutes he would be bounced off a satellite and connected with the new acting head of the DIA, or the Chief of Naval Operations, or even the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Hayden Land. The problem was that the CIA might be monitoring the circuit.

Not the CIA as an organization, but whoever it was that had a grubby hand on Tenney’s strings. The agency was so compartmentalized that a rogue department head might be able to run his own covert operation for years before anyone found out. If anyone found out. If the man at the top took reasonable care and kept his operation buried within another, legitimate operation, it was conceivable that it might never be discovered.

The more he thought about it, the more convinced Jake was that he had tripped over just such an operation. Who controlled it, what its goals were, how many people were involved — he had no answers to any of these questions.

So the encrypted voice circuits were out. A commercial line? Every phone in the embassy was monitored.

And if he found a circuit, who was he going to talk to? If these people could casually squash a three-star general, no one was beyond reach. The ambassador? That Boston Brahman, that man of distinction in a whiskey ad? Yet he had to trust someone.

The military was built on trust. Trust and communications. In today’s world of high-tech weapons systems and instant communications everyone in the system was merely a moving part. Amazingly, none of the moving parts were critical. As soon as one wore out, was wounded or killed, it was replaced. And the machine never paused, never faltered as long as the communications network remained intact.

Herb Tenney was a soldier too. Staring at the ceiling, Jake told himself he must not forget that fact.

As he began to go over it all for the third or fourth time, his frustration got the better of him. He climbed from the bed and went to the window. The sun hadn’t set yet. He tried to visualize what the city must look like in the snow, for snow was the norm. The mean annual temperature here was minus two degrees centigrade. These long, balmy days were but a short interlude in the life of the city and those who inhabited it. In spite of the sun’s golden glow he could see buildings in a gray winter’s half-light amid the snow driven along by the wind. He could feel the cutting cold.

The Russian winter had killed tens of thousands of soldiers in the past three hundred years, he reflected. No doubt it could kill a few more.